Executive Summary
The vision of East Durham Children’s Initiative (EDCI) is for all children and youth in the Initiative’s focus area to successfully graduate high school, ready for college or a career. Providing high-quality ...

Over the past decade, commercial mining firms in the United States have increasingly used horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas from shale rock formations (shale gas). The production ...

A swathe of research attests to the importance of governance in achieving economic growth and poverty reduction in developing countries. Whether governance has an equal effect across sectors, however, is a question that ...

College admissions decisions often rest heavily on a student’s high school grades, but teachers have significant flexibility in how they assign grades. Differential grading occurs when students are held to different grading ...

Policy Question
What new media tactics should be employed to galvanize North Carolina Millennial voters in the run-up to the May 8, 2012 vote on Amendment One?
Background and Policy Context
The Coalition to Protect ...

Introduction
Duke Interdisciplinary Social Innovators (DISI) is a model for organizing graduate students at universities to do interdisciplinary, problem-oriented projects for non-profit clients. In its first year, 149 ...

POLICY QUESTION
“What is the relationship between inequality and economic growth? Specifically, does income inequality hamper or foster economic growth in developing countries?”
BACKGROUND
As the global economy ...

In this paper, the SME financial sectors of Brazil, Mexico and Chile are studied in order to understand some of the obstacles to Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) financing in Latin America and to offer solutions on how ...

Low high school graduation rates prove a major challenge for policymakers throughout the United States. Durham, North Carolina is no exception. Durham’s graduation rate is currently 77%, compared to the North Carolina ...

In tight fiscal times, the North Carolina General Assembly and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) would like to increase the efficiency of their expenditures. With the increased availability of teacher-level education ...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
POLICY QUESTION
How can Ecuador effectively control their terrestrial borders in accordance with the human rights framework defined by their 2008 Constitution?
RECOMMENDATION (Pg. 8)
I ...

In this paper I look at the effect of gender quotas on women’s political engagement. In particular I ask whether the enactment of a gender quota encourages women to become more involved in politics by sending the signal ...

North Carolina has a long history of offering state bonds meant to address the capital needs of its public school system. The last major State effort taken to help counties in funding capital needs took place in 1996 with ...

The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) is a Durham-based organization that works to promote homeownership and economic opportunity for low and moderate income communities and communities of color, which traditionally ...

Executive Summary
Policy Question
How does perceived drinking water quality affect household willingness to pay (WTP) for clean water in rural Cambodia?
Background
Inadequate access to improved water and ...

Understanding the impact of job loss on student achievement has grown increasingly important given the widespread job loss that occurred during the Great Recession. I evaluate the impact of county-level job loss within ...

Low current and forecasted natural gas prices are spurring investment in new gas-fired electric generation in the eastern United States. In both regulated territories and organized electricity markets, natural gas power ...

Despite widespread efforts to end the practice of female genital cutting (FGC), the practice persists across much of the world, including The Gambia. In The Gambia, approximately 78 percent of women are circumcised. In ...